Talk:A-10 Thunderbolt II/@comment-67.193.224.167-20160726204801/@comment-4391208-20160811044239
As long as you kept them well supplied you could just line up and slowly advance and nothing would even be capable of getting close till the BETA wised up and realised they had to shoot back. Fluff is still fluff, which should be the priority in these kind of discussions. Defensive tactics against Destroyers entail shooting their legs to stop the horde while other TSFs rush ahead for laserjagd, and a successful one would allow artillery/carpet bombing to be implemented. If all these are about final strategy, there's no better "kill at range" than delivering it from well out of range with no Laser consideration. Not to mention that line tactics for the A-10 are just as much a dramatic ideal situation. BETA groups as large as overland ones are fully capable of tunneling underground and under defence lines, not to mention opening up right under large congregations of allied forces, and it's is a trait of the BETA to add in ~10k swarms as and when they like it. At some point the line will have to face a make-or-break flanking attack. ''I'd argue the reverse - the TSF is specilized for mobility, and thereofore suffers in combat endurance, durability, and offensive power with respect to the post-Intruder TSAs. They're less manuverable, but from an areodynamics standpoint I'd question the propositon that their top straight-line speed is much lower. Obviously, it's undeniable that their throw weight, defenses, and staying power are all superior. '' I wouldn't call the TSFs specialized compared to the A-10, considering that the A-10 is the special model F-4 variant. The very first lunar exoskeleton already looked to mobility, it's just that humanity's choices were further validated when Earthside-development of armor for both melee and anti-Laser wasn't able to match up to the BETA anyways. The A-10's engines are developed from Phantom models. During development, engine issues with stability and stress would imply that standard TSF technogy used in the F-4 wasn't enough to keep up with the unit. I doubt that the A-10 is anything but excruciatingly slow relative to TSFs, as the TSFiA articles that featured it have described it as such, especially if it has been using a 1G-developed engine since the start, while TSFs have only become faster and more maneuverable while their loiter time has only been improving since the start. The A-10 isn't built or deployed with laserjagd in mind, which vastly improves its fuel consumption rate simply because it isn't in NOE flight or even boosted jumps most of the time. The A-10 may be innately built to have staying power armaments-wise, but fuel-wise is another matter altogether. To answer the original comment, the A-10 is still in procurement for European regional forces. It's a TSF built during early Hive assault doctrine when highly mobile brute force was the only way to force their foot into the Hive, which it would have contributed to by freeing up more mobile TSFs to do while accomplishing much more defensively than its less-armored counterparts. The A-10 wasn't the only TS model to suffer later on - G-Bombing doctrine and its subsequent validation in Operation Lucifer threatened several aspects, including the production of normal TSFs, and also threatened to cancel the production of the F-22 at one point. This is in addition to US forces shifting towards washing their hands off mainland defence ever since the 1980s, after the European battles. It isn't just simply because "they stopped making them IRL so they stopped making them in-universe".